Contractors with PG&E work in a trench to lay underground electric cables in Placer County near Shanri La Lane and Mt. Aukum Road on Oct. 17, 2024.Diane Moss lost her home in the Santa Monica Mountains after power lines ignited the apocalyptic Woolsey Fire in 2018. Since then, she’s pressed for a safer electric grid in California.
And the costs are projected to keep rising: The three companies — Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric — continue to seek billions more from customers for wildfire prevention spending. Rates are expected to continue outpacing inflationin the nation, outside of Hawaii. Other reasons include rooftop solar incentives, new transmission systems and upgrades for electric vehicles.
Sumeet Singh, PG&E’s chief operating officer, told CalMatters that the utility is concerned about rates, too. He said the company is “very committed to stabilizing our customer rates as we go forward without compromising safety. I think that’s clear, that it’s a non-negotiable….There’s a pretty robust process, and oversight, that we are under.”
Moss, the clean energy advocate, evacuated her home with her son that day. Her husband, clinging to hope, stayed until the blaze threatened to swallow him whole. Their neighborhood near Malibu, with its heavily wooded surroundings, was no match for the inferno. “It just takes the wrong ignition … under the right conditions, to have a catastrophic fire,” Thomas Jacobs said. “But are we in a better place? The numbers seem to indicate we’re moving in the right direction.”
SDG&E began prioritizing wildfire prevention, including underground and insulated lines, a decade ahead of the other two utilities, after its lines sparked three major fires in 2007. The company has avoided a catastrophic fire since 2007, despite operating in one of the nation’s most fire-prone regions.
“We now have this very odd system,” said Lynch, who served on the utilities commission from 2000 through 2004. “The Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety reviews the plans, puts out guidelines, but then the still has to ratify the plans, so that the utilities can take money from their ratepayers.
The utilities challenged many of the findings, saying they didn’t plan to claim some of the costs, and disputed the auditor’s conclusions as well as some of their calculations. In interviews with CalMatters, representatives for all three utilities said the process in place to oversee wildfire spending at the utilities commission was robust and thorough.